thanks a lot I will read them both this week. this one looks really good, a lot of great thought and research put into it. Do you give credit to your sources or is it just knowledge you have from all your previous studies?

RJ

Dear RJ,

Your recent correspondence has been brought to my attention.

The Modern Answer

I tend to give page links to Wikipedia articles and when citing the Oxford English Dictionary, I always give them credit.

The more complete answer.

I wish I had Wikipedia when I was younger as I could go from article to article with a click, instead of searching and pulling different books. I realize the academic standards of Wikipedia are lacking, but it serves a purpose. The OED is a comprehensive and scholarly work that is second to none-every word ever used in the English language with every definition. The 1960's edition is 26 volumes plus supplements and a copy, as of this writing, can be found in the Vigo county library.

My website is not exclusively my own research or discoveries. The only discovery that is mine was made while reading an Egyptian dictionary at the turn of the century. [Vide] It was then that I realized the true nature of the Tarot cards- any reference to Hebrew letters is a veil to the uninitiated. A.E. Waite, I later discovered, hinted at the true nature of the Tarot a century before my "rediscovery". Although the text of "A Day in the Garden" is from Genesis chapters 2 and 3, the music is my creation. Occultists, unlike scholars, have a tendency to "borrow" from other sources and pass the work off as their own; therefore we should not be surprised at the size of "Morals and Dogma", "Isis Unveiled" and the writings of Saint Augustine.

References are given in scholarly and scientific works so that the information can be quickly verified and to speed up further research by building upon the work of others. The reason why philosophers and occultists do not list references will be discussed below.

In the modern age, all writings are available to those who can read and before the year 1800 this was almost exclusively men of higher learning. There is a tendency among philosophers not to cite references, for example, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche.

The first explanation is that in order for the reader to become a co-conspirator, the reader must take some initiative and this includes their own research. These writers listed above know that few people will take the time to do their own reading and thinking. These writers are not writing to everyone, but, as Leo Strauss mentions in passing, to young men who like to think.

The second explanation is wholly my conjecture: in their personal lives these individuals have had to "talk down" or "dumb down" their speech, therefore they treat the reader as an equal, so they make the assumption that the reader knows everything the writer knows. If the reader is an equal, they will eventually understand, if the reader is not an equal or is not capable of understanding, then there is no harm. The reason that so many of these writings are dull and incoherent is that the goal is to entice the reader to stop reading. While this seems counterintuitive, there is no other explanation for writings like Parmenides. The idea of writing to an equal can be clearly seen in Nietzsche's writings. We must remember that before Nietzsche became a critic he was a trained philologist and offered a professorship at age 24. Fred and Rush Limbaugh agree: "Words have meanings". We must keep in mind that these writers don't want to be remembered by everyone, but only by a select and elite group of men that will perpetuate their memory for all time.

While these writings are not impossible to understand, they will require re-reading the text. For example, Hardouin's prolegomena doesn't adequately explain what he is trying to convey until the last chapters. This forces the reader to start anew with this untimely information. Modern educators would say this is poor writing because they are conditioned to write openly and clearly. Some writers use what I call the "or Code". Once again, this is typically encountered towards the end of the book, forcing the reader to re-read the book to understand the new definition and, of course, the reader must realize on his own that the writer is creating new definitions. For example: in this response, I have separately described different aspects of philosophers and occultists, however if the reader encounters "philosophers or occultists", the reader must start at the beginning of the work and each time "philosophers" is written the reader must think "occultists" to understand the meaning of the term "occultist".

The terrible truth is that these writers have nothing new to contribute to human knowledge; they all have the same ideas and understand the same phenomena, although expressed differently. I will use a poor example, as mathematics is understood by everyone. If Rousseau wrote on every page "1+4" and Locke wrote "2+3" and Nietzsche wrote "3+2" and Plato "the square root of 25", all readers would reach the same conclusion, namely "5". The significance of the number would need to be understood in the context of the page. However, if these numbers only appeared once per work, no doubt in the middle of the work after many chapters of drivel and nonsense, many readers would still realize the number five has a significance. But, because these writers are discussing "esoteric" ideas, few individuals will fully understand what they are reading, although many will suppose they understand the author's intention. As Nietzsche wrote "Knowledge has no obligation to ignorance".